Baseball Maverick Page 20

  It was David Wright. Alderson, uncharacteristically, had no comeback and just shook his head and laughed.

  “The nice thing about the Wheeler trade was that the press kept saying, ‘They’ll never get a top-line prospect for Beltrán because it’s a two-month rental,’” Alderson says. “We kept saying we’re shooting for the best prospect we can get, but media commentary lowered expectations. So when we got Zack nobody could believe it. The same thing happened with the R. A. Dickey trade.”

  Alderson’s point was not to take any of it too seriously. In the same way media expectations can help you by being overly low, they can hurt you by being too high. Either way, you’d be wise never to congratulate yourself and instead keep focusing on the next step.

  “Making a deal is different than putting a good team together,” Alderson said. “You can be good at making deals and lousy at other things, but making good deals does give you credibility and credibility is an organizational requirement. The defining criteria are winning and losing and I understand that, but at the same time you have to have the discipline to see where you are and where you have to go… . Who knows what’s going to happen this year. We were talking the other day and said, ‘OK, if we have a winning season, will that be a good season?’ Well, yes, unless the prospects, on whom all the future is predicated, go in the tank. If we have a winning season and the d’Arnauds of the world, the Wheelers of the world, all tank, we’re back to ground zero. So a good year for us would be a winning record, yes, successful at the major-league level, but just as important would be the continued development of our farm system, and not just the top three or four guys, but other prospects that we have below them who have to develop into better players.”

  Alderson gave me a tour of the Mets’ complex in Port St. Lucie. Across from Tradition Field we walked past several different diamonds, and maybe it was the perfect weather, or the steady stream of cheerful fans poking around the palm-lined paths in search of a star of tomorrow, or the bright orange foul poles and Mets-blue batting cages, but there was a jaunty, upbeat feel to the place. Along the way we passed a big sign, flanked by a full-sized cutout of a grinning Mr. Met, with such helpful tips as STAY ALERT AT ALL TIMES FOR THROWN OR BATTED BALLS. Then as we completed the circuit to head back into Alderson’s office, he was set upon by a knot of fans. Despite the cheery mood, I was expecting some pointed questions. But these were not that type of fan.

  “I like what you’re doing,” said one fan in a Mets cap, squinting in the Florida sun as he held out a pen for an autograph.

  “Building up the farm team,” another chimed in.

  “Fifty million coming off at the end of the year,” said another.

  Boom, boom, boom, as if on cue. I had the momentary sense it had to be a setup, paid actors hired for my benefit, but if so Alderson would surely have looked like he was enjoying himself, instead of vaguely at ease, like it was a little more belief and excitement than he quite bargained for.

  Later he talked about not wanting to bring Zack Wheeler along too quickly in part because fans love to believe in the future. “I’m not ready to wholly convert the myth into the reality at this point, because these guys of mythical status are what’s carrying our plan in the minds of all of these fans out there,” he said that week in Florida. “It’s not just, ‘Are they going to be good enough?’ It’s, ‘OK, they’re good, they’re here, what’s next?’ So stretching it out has as much to do with maintaining that belief on the part of the fan base, but you can’t stretch it out unreasonably. People see right through that.”

  I caught up again with Alderson the next day down the third-base line. I’d been watching from the front row as Wheeler warmed up in the bullpen before he entered the game in the third inning. I’m no scout, not by a long shot, but there are certain things you notice when you’ve spent many years watching baseball players for a living. One is balance. Wheeler had command issues at every step on his way up, befitting a thin six-foot-four power pitcher, but his motion itself had a tightly coiled ease to it. The ball came flying out at the end of his delivery like an afterthought, but it was easy to see that his fastballs had that most valuable quality: late, explosive movement. Todd Van Poppel had a straight fastball. Wheeler’s ball had life. As for his nerves, he looked composed, if a little fidgety, as he was pitching, but when he’d thrown enough pitches to be warm and paused to look out over his shoulder at the early innings of the game he was about to enter, the mask slipped away. Suddenly he had the punched-in-the-gut blank look of a sprinter walking up to the starting line, mouth hanging open.

  Out on the mound, Wheeler looked just fine getting ready to face his first Nationals hitter, Steve Lombardozzi, but for all the appreciative murmuring in the stands about the way his fastball made catcher John Buck’s glove snap back with a pop, Wheeler was showing signs of wildness. Behind in the count, he threw a breaking ball that looked like a strike.

  “Squeezing him a little?” Alderson asked conversationally.

  Wheeler walked Lombardozzi and then, with Bryce Harper up, threw a fastball Buck couldn’t handle. Lombardozzi moved to second when the ball glanced off Buck’s glove for a wild pitch. David Wright and the rest of the infield converged on the mound for a meeting to calm the young pitcher down.

  “You a little amped up?” Buck asked him. “Your heart beating?”

  “Yeah, just a little,” Wheeler said.

  “Good, you should be,” Buck told him, getting a smile.

  “You’re good enough to beat these guys,” Wright told him. “Just relax and go.’’

  Harper grounded out, moving the runner to third, but it didn’t matter. By then Wheeler had started to look comfortable and hit 96 on the gun with his fastball.

  “He’s not a finesse pitcher,” Alderson told me. “He’s got enough movement on his fastball. He’s looking for a strikeout here with a man on third and one out.”

  He got it, too, striking out Tyler Moore. Then he struck out Chad Tracy to end the inning.

  “Well, what looked like an inauspicious beginning turned out well,” Alderson said, leaning back in his chair. “Will he settle down and start throwing strikes?”

  David Wright, due to hit in the bottom of the inning, was taking his warm-up swings with a winning combination of grinning nonchalance and quiet fury. “We talk about friendly but professional,” Alderson said. “He’s got a casual but professional demeanor, exactly what you’re looking for. He’s got a lot of self-confidence, but it doesn’t consume him. He’s a pretty humble guy, so he carries himself like he’s done it before. It impacts the other players.”

  This was shortly before Wright was named team captain, becoming only the fourth in team history, after Gary Carter, Keith Hernandez, and John Franco.

  Justin Turner, the grinning redhead utility player out of Lakewood, California, was playing second that day, taking grounders with his usual bouncy good cheer, as if it was all great fun. Turner threw to first base and we both paused to consider the case of Ike Davis, one of those players who comes along now and then and everyone seems to hope he’ll make it. Ike played college ball at Arizona State, where he was batting .394 with sixteen homers when the Mets drafted him in the first round of the 2008 draft. Rated the third-best collegiate power hitter in the draft by Baseball America, he hit nineteen homers in 2010 as a rookie, a promising enough start, but saw limited action in 2011 because of an ankle injury, though even then he showed more than glimpses. Davis was healthy in 2012, but he muddled through a horrible start to the season. By June 10 he was batting just .162 with five home runs and calls were multiplying for the Mets to send him down to the minor leagues. He bounced back.

  “He’s got a lot of upside,” Alderson told me. “He’s still young. I think he has a chance to be a leader on the team as well, a leader among the younger group of players, sort of a lieutenant to Wright’s captaincy, but he’s got to perform. He doesn’t hit left-handed pitching very well. He’s got to improve that substantially. He has a pret
ty good eye at the plate. He’s not a free swinger. Last year he missed a lot of pitches, got out of sync, jumping out in front of the ball, but he wound up with thirty-two home runs. If you can hit thirty-two home runs by mistake, we’ll take it.”

  We talked about the plan of everything pointing toward the 2014 season, with Wheeler and Syndergaard another year along, d’Arnaud showing what he can do, and the deadweight of failed contracts coming off the books. Everything pointed toward a patient and disciplined approach, as Alderson and I had discussed, but I wondered, sitting there with Alderson at this spring-training game, if sometimes he tired of the discipline and patience.

  “Is there part of you that wishes you could just get to that now?” I asked him.

  “Oh sure,” he said quickly. “That’s the temptation. That’s where the discipline comes in or, alternatively, the question of whether the discipline has been taken too far and it’s time to do something different, still within the framework of what you’re trying to do long term.”

  Wheeler came back out to start his second inning to a big hand from the crowd and then got things going with two straight groundouts. Then he gave up a single.

  “So the leadoff walk, five outs, and then a single,” Alderson said. “He’s keeping the ball down. If he keeps it down there at 95, he won’t have to worry about the next hitter.”

  Wheeler got a groundout to put his second scoreless inning in the books, clearly an impressive debut for the first televised spring-training game of the year.

  “He handled himself very well, especially after digging a hole for himself with the first five pitches,” Alderson said.

  “What is fun for you here in spring training in general?” I followed up.

  “Almost everything. I like to walk around and communicate and engage with people, and spring training is the perfect place to do that.”

  Building a team amounts to a series of freeze-frame shots you hope to put together to form the right movie. Wheeler’s solid first outing in the spring of 2013 was a small step forward for the organization and helped build the narrative power of the young-pitching-can-build-the-future story line. Then again, Wheeler did not pitch again for the Mets that spring. A minor strain of the oblique muscle in his abdomen shut him down.

  The problem with the rotation was at the top. Santana, the staff ace and intended Opening Day starter, due $25.5 million in salary for the year, came into spring training talking about wanting to pitch for his home country of Venezuela in the World Baseball Classic in March. On February 22 the team announced that Santana’s first appearance would be pushed back. It was a tune Mets fans knew all too well.

  Wheeler found his name on the list of ten young players demoted on March 9 from the Mets’ big-league camp to minor-league camp, a world away. Among the others sent down were some names that might never be known to anyone but Paul DePodesta and a few other insiders, and some who had a shot at getting a call-up that year or the next, like the Dominican righthanded pitcher Gonzalez Germen, a fastball guy, mostly, known for his changeup (“very good,” Alderson dubbed it) and for his inconsistency. At the time Alderson saw him as “an up-and-down guy who might develop into a seventh-inning option.” Another name on that list of players was the intriguing twenty-four-year-old Juan Lagares, also Dominican, who was signed by the Mets when he was seventeen years old. Lagares was a shortstop then, and he wasn’t converted to the outfield until three years later.

  Lagares did not impress at first. He hit .210 for Single-A Savannah over eighty-three games in 2007 and, dealing with some pain in his arm, was sent down from Savannah to low-A Brooklyn, where he was still a shortstop but did play five games at third base. His progress was slow, mostly because he kept getting hurt. He had some ankle trouble and recurring elbow issues. The organization loved his athleticism, but injuries were getting in the way of his play, making him more inconsistent. He had issues throwing the ball to first.

  “When I first met him he was an infielder,” said Josh Satin, Lagares’ teammate on the 2008 Brooklyn Cyclones and 2009 Savannah Sand Gnats. “Obviously he had all the talent in the world, but he had so much athleticism, he didn’t know how to harness it. He had a really good arm at short, but he would throw the ball away a lot.”

  That was when the Mets decided that the large volume of throws a shortstop makes might be part of the problem. Why not try him in the outfield? At Savannah in 2009, Lagares was all over the place—twenty-three games in left field, seventeen in right, two in center, two at shortstop, and one at third base. But suddenly he looked like a player with a future. “I was a little surprised to be moved and at the beginning it was a little hard, but you never know what is going to happen in this game,” Lagares told me.

  “When they moved him to the outfield, you could see right away he was more comfortable,” Satin said.

  Playing for AA Binghamton in 2011 after a call-up from St. Lucie, he had only one game in center field, the rest in right or left, and batted .370 over thirty-eight games. Only in 2012 did he finally play more in center field than elsewhere, getting seventy games there and hitting .283 in 130 games with four homers and forty-eight RBIs. He learned center field in a hurry because of his focus and intensity. “He works hard,” Satin said. “Everything he did was hard. He played hard, he ran hard, and he was hard on himself.”

  It was enough to get noticed in the system, but not enough to establish Lagares as the Mets’ top prospect at center field, a distinction held at the time by Matt den Dekker. “Lagares was still behind den Dekker in the minds of most of us,” Alderson said.

  13

  SWEEP

  It did not take long for the Mets’ 2013 season to turn into the Matt Harvey show. There were countless other questions the team needed to resolve before it could take a step forward, but Harvey’s drop-what-you’redoing-to-check-this-out starts had a way of canceling all that out. In his first start of the year, the second game of the season for the Mets, he struck out ten Padres batters and gave up just one hit and no runs over seven innings for the victory. Up against Roy Halladay in Philadelphia his next time out, he limited the Phillies to three hits and one run in seven innings, striking out nine and getting the win. By his third start, in which he carried a no-hit bid into the seventh inning against the Twins in Minneapolis, he had everyone’s attention.

  Harvey was 3-0 for the year with twenty-five strikeouts and just two earned runs allowed in twenty-two innings, and as impressive as his numbers were, they did not begin to do justice to the Harvey phenomenon. Like Dwight Gooden in the 1980s, Harvey could blow hitters away with a dazzling fastball, and like Gooden he was so dominant, so transcendent, every start of his became an event. He might have no-hit stuff, or he might be merely devastating, but one thing he was always going to be was deeply entertaining. He was a showman and he was a winner. He won each of his first five starts in 2013, pitching at least six innings per game, never giving up more than four hits or three runs.

  On Sunday, April 28, I was at Citi Field with my friend David Blum to watch the Mets. Unfortunately, we missed Harvey, scheduled to start the next day in Miami, but left-hander Jon Niese pitched well, holding the Phillies scoreless through the first four innings. The Mets had taken a 1–0 lead in the first when shortstop Rubén Tejada doubled and David Wright singled him home. My main impressions at that point had to do with the outfield: 1) Lucas Duda, being asked to handle left field that day, should go back to first base, and 2) outfielder Juan Lagares, called up to handle center field with Matt den Dekker hurt and Kirk Nieuwenhuis being demoted (he was batting .125), was fun to watch.

  Lagares didn’t believe it at first when Las Vegas 51s manager Wally Backman told him he’d been promoted, Andrew Keh reported in the Times. “I thought he was just playing with me,” he told Keh. “I said, ‘Are you serious?’” Lagares red-eyed it to New York in time to join the Mets for Tuesday’s game earlier that week in what Keh called “a mostly unheralded arrival,” then collected his first big-league hit after enterin
g the game in the fifth.

  Lagares handled eight fly balls over the course of the game on Sunday, giving my friend Dave and me ample opportunity to assess his talent.

  “I like the way this kid moves,” I told Dave.

  “Yeah?” he said, looking away from the field to take another bite of his hot dog. Dave was not sold on Lagares.

  Niese gave up a solo shot to Freddy Galvis in the fifth to tie it up 1–1, but by the sixth had settled in. Chase Utley, leading off, poked an outside fastball to left-center field, well hit, but a ball Lagares tracked down just before the warning track. What impressed me about Lagares was the quick jump he got on contact and the clean lines he followed to the ball. Michael Young, up next, went after a 2-2 curveball and lifted it to right-center. Once again, Lagares had a great jump, taking half a dozen quick, brisk strides to put himself in position, and then eased up and caught the ball at a languid lope, making a play that would challenge some big-leaguers look easy. Then came an awkward moment after Carlos Ruiz doubled to right. Domonic Brown hit the ball sharply to left-center in the no-man’s-land between fielders, and both Duda in left and Lagares in center ran all out toward the ball, heading directly for each other. A Duda collision with anyone could be ugly, given the man’s size. But Lagares, cool and composed, loudly called him off the ball, Duda pulled back at the last second, and Lagares snagged the ball to end the inning, his third straight putout. Lagares had two walks but went hitless, as did most of the Mets that day on their way to a 5–1 loss.

  It reminded me of a long conversation I had with Barry Bonds before a game in San Francisco back in the late ’90s when he was at his peak with the Giants. Bonds was an excellent outfielder, which was why he won the Gold Glove eight times. He slowed down later, as he got heavier, no question, but he was always very smart about positioning and thinking along with a hitter to anticipate where the ball was likely to go. He was appalled, talking to me, at the way SportsCenter would often highlight catches just because they were showy, a guy diving to snag a ball he should have had easily. Worse, Bonds said, was when he positioned himself perfectly, got a great jump, and made a tough play look simple—and then was criticized for looking like he wasn’t trying. Lagares had that kind of look. I wondered why I hadn’t heard of him before and vowed to pay attention to see if he was really as good out there as he looked that Sunday.